A/N: Good day, my friends. Here I have yet another M/M fic...I'm really writing too many for this pairing. Well, whatever. This will be a three-shot, updated every Saturday, hopefully.
And now I have to justify doing a Zombie Apocalypse AU. Well. Uh...I dunno. It's cliche and overdone, I get that, but I just wanted to try it, and when I got the idea in my head, it WOULD NOT LEAVE. No kid. So I thought I may as well make it short-ish, so as not to prolong any cheese-related pain. I tried to make it slightly different...?
Also, the personalities in this fic are different to my normal take on them. I wanted to try writing a badass Matt. I have no regrets. Make of it what you will! But please review afterwards.
Disclaimer: I don't own any Death Notes, characters or zombies. Happy times.
In Which We Begin in the Middle of the End
Mello kept his eyes on Naomi's back as he followed her through the deserted town, rifle held ready. There were signs that zombies had been here recently, and they didn't want to be taken by surprise.
In all honesty, the two almost certainly would have stayed in the safehouse that day if it wasn't for their dwindling food supplies, which, despite only having a couple of consumers, were getting frighteningly low. As such, Naomi and Mello had decided that it was time they replenished their stock – baking hot, zombie-filled Wednesday afternoon be damned.
So far, they hadn't seen hide nor drool of any of the shamblers, and were glad for it. Hot as they were, and fatigued from the long hike to the town, it was unlikely that they would have escaped with no injuries. And injuries in their living conditions were to be avoided at all costs, unless one had the luck or money to acquire antibiotics.
Naomi stopped, and Mello walked to stand next to her. They were in front of a fairly small house that looked as if it had once been occupied by a decently well-off family. A good stop for non-perishables, then.
Naomi glanced at Mello, who nodded. She took a step back, then delivered a powerful kick to the painted door. With a loud crack, the lock broke and the two hurried in, wary of any zombies that may have heard the sound.
Sure enough, in what must have been the former pantry the pair found tins of baked beans, spaghetti hoops and tuna, as well as plenty jars of peanut butter (good for energy) and boxes of individually packed cereal portions. Mello marvelled at the convenience and sheer abundance of the stuff; normally they were lucky to find anything other than canned foods in an abandoned house, and even those in shortage. This family had evidently stocked up at the beginning of the apocalypse.
Smart people, Mello allowed as he filled his rucksack, silently thanking the empty heavens for leading them to this goldmine.
They checked the fridge as a token act on their way out, but as expected, there was nothing edible there anymore, apart from possibly a couple of wizened apples. Unfortunately, no water was to be found either. Elusive hydrogen oxide had suddenly become more valuable than gold when the reservoirs dried up, and Naomi and Mello were running low.
They were out of the house and walking back in the direction they had come from when they heard it. The tell-tale shuffling, dragging sound of a zombie gang.
Unlike in the movies, zombies did not moan and growl, which meant that they were inconveniently difficult to detect, unless one was constantly on their guard. Thankfully, Mello and Naomi were.
They whipped around, and sure enough, a group of zombies was just rounding the corner. It wasn't too big; seven or eight, maybe. But then Mello's ears picked up a noise from behind. Turning, he saw another group advancing upon them. This one was larger, with possibly ten members. He tapped Naomi's shoulder urgently. She looked over her shoulder and swore.
"We're surrounded," she spat, cocking her rifle and aiming it at a shambler that was getting just slightly too close. She pulled the trigger and the zombie fell to the ground, viscous blood oozing from the hole above its right eye.
Mello fired at the group coming from the other side. He hit his mark and promptly shot another. Agitated by the noise, the zombies were speeding up, advancing faster than they could shoot them down. Seconds later, they were upon them.
Mello rammed the butt of his rifle into the closest, fired at another, and then took the opportunity to finish off the one he'd sent to the ground. A quick check over his shoulder told him Naomi was doing much the same. Reassured of her and his back's safety, Mello refocused on taking out his group.
They felt like more when they were crowding in on him, somehow. Mello felt overwhelmed; both by the number of the things and their stench. It was reminiscent of rotting corpses, with a hint of chemical. Mello had come to associate the smell with hatred: hatred for the zombies, hatred for their pointless not-lives, hatred for the fools that had done this to them. He outed his hatred and rage through violence.
Smashing his gloved hand into the face of one assailant, he ducked a lunge from another, taking it down with a well-aimed kick to the solar plexus. Rifles were almost worse than useless at this close-range; he dropped his, unconcerned that it would be used against him (zombies didn't have the dexterity or the intelligence, not even to use it as a bludgeon), and set about crushing the skulls of as many zombies he could. Unfortunately, that seemed to be the only way to kill them: a headshot.
Normally, it would be quite difficult to abuse a person's head enough for it to cave in, but the zombies had softened bone, similar to an infant's – a side-effect of the transformation and subsequent decay, it had been theorised. Therefore, Mello was perfectly well-off with a stamp on the skull, or indeed with whacking them against a wall. It was hardly graceful fighting, but no one cared for aesthetics where they were anyway.
Any immediate danger vanquished, Mello checked on Naomi again, just in time to see two zombies about to tackle her from behind. He yelled out to her, and she rammed her fist into the closest's face just in time, while he dove for his gun, aimed and fired at the other, which was just about to sink its teeth into her shoulder.
He missed.
The bullet whizzed past the zombie and hit Naomi instead, sending a spray of blood from her arm.
Fuck! Mello yelled inwardly, frozen in shock.
Naomi cried out and clutched at her shoulder, letting her guard down just long enough for the shambler to grab her and bite into her neck. She shrieked and belaboured it with her good arm, causing both it and her to fall to the pavement.
Coming to his senses, Mello raised his rifle again and shot. This time, the bullet sailed cleanly through the zombie's brain and it crumpled back down to the ground.
Turning to scan for any more attackers and seeing none, Mello ran over to his comrade, who was already looking pale from blood loss.
"Naomi!" he shouted, more frantic than he'd have liked to admit. The two were good friends, even more so after her fiancé Raye and the rest of their team had been changed – they had been the last ones for a while now.
His hands shaking slightly, Mello rummaged for the bandages in his pack and started tying up Naomi's fast-bleeding neck wound, though he knew it was pointless now.
"Don't bother," she voiced his thoughts with a rueful smile. "We both know it's useless."
Mello bit his lip, shaking his head. "No, I – I don't –"
"Mello," she whispered tenderly, ruffling his hair with her good hand, "you're going to have to be brave now." She had always seen him as the son she didn't dare to have in their broken world, and he in return had hesitantly begun to see her as something of a mother figure. Looking at her now, injured through Mello's own fault, felt akin to getting his heart ripped out of his chest piece by shattered piece.
Still smiling, she pressed the rifle he had dropped into his hand. "Shoot me. Please."
Mello stared at her, numb.
"Through the head," she continued. "And don't miss this time." Still poking fun at him, even in her last moments.
Mello shook his head desperately. He couldn't do this. He could never do this.
"Mello." She looked him in the eye, piercing through his walls as always. "Please. You know what's waiting for me if you don't, and I'd rather stay dead than the alternative. It would be comparatively painless too, you know that." Comparatively painless for her, possibly. "Come now, Mello, please. Let me take this one last chance to be with Raye again."
Mello shook his head again, this time in defeat, tears dripping slowly down his cheeks. He hadn't cried like this since the first time he'd seen one of his team-mates die.
"Fine," he murmured brokenly, his hands tightening on the gun, all shakes gone through sheer power of will.
"Thank you." Naomi beamed up at him. "And Mello...I'm sorry."
Mello snarled, partly in pain, partly in derision. "Idiot. I'm the one who should be sorry."
And then he shot her.
Mello fell to his knees beside his last friend and ally. He was alone now. The last one left alive.
Mello sat listlessly in his dingy bedroom in the safehouse. The trip back to base had gone without incident; everything ordinary apart from the fact that he had been carrying two packs, and had no one to chat with to while away the long walk.
He had enough food to last him for a good number of days now, but that wasn't his main concern. While they had been gone, a piece of falling debris (Mello suspected, anyway) had knocked the lid off the single barrel of water he had left. Some of it had evaporated, obviously, but more importantly, the water had been contaminated with dirt and dust and pathogens, making it necessary to throw it away. If he were to have drunk it, he'd probably have been worse off than if he had let himself die of thirst.
He could have boiled it, but it would have taken hours that he couldn't spare, and would have resulted in even more evaporation. He would have had to filter it all too, to get rid of the solid muck.
Sighing, Mello had concluded that he may as well dump the water. He would have to find some more quickly though; the only amount he had left was in his half-empty water bottle in his pack.
Not good, Mello thought morosely, though he couldn't draw himself far enough out of apathy to be overly concerned. I'd never have had to face this problem if the world hadn't gone to shit.
Mello had been born into a very middle-class family. Two parents with respectable jobs, a modest house in a nice area and of course the obligatory border collie. He had been happy, though he hadn't appreciated it enough at the time.
And then it had all gone haywire.
There had been a swine-flu epidemic; people dying all over the globe and the rest panicking like headless chickens. The governments had been rushed into making vaccines for the flu strain, and Mello supposed it was the rush that caused them to make their crucial mistake. However, by the time the unwanted side-effects of the jab had been realised, over half of the world's population had been zombified.
The vaccine induced a terrible illness, symptoms including a fever, lethargy and slow motor functions, along with severe abdominal pain. It would kill a person in a week maximum, and only a few hours after death, the corpse would get up and stumble around, shocking all onlookers into stillness until it sank its teeth into one.
That was how the disease was spread; the infusion of saliva into the blood. A couple of days after the initial bite, the victim would start showing the symptoms of the disease caused by the vaccine, and the whole thing would start again.
Naturally, at the beginning of the crisis, people had been far too busy blaming the governments of their various countries to work out a way to put the zombies permanently to rest. By the time they finally started to catch onto how to properly kill them, three quarters of the human population was gone, and the survivors were hopelessly outnumbered.
It was at about this point that Mello had been rescued by Naomi and Raye. His home had come under attack from a pack of zombies, and his parents had been mostly eaten alive. Fifteen-year-old Mello had panicked and barricaded himself in his bedroom. A good plan, he later realised, as his window had a view out onto the street through which Raye had first spotted him.
He and his fiancée had fought their way through to him and dragged him out through the window, resulting in nothing more than a sprained ankle, miraculously. After they had lost the zombies, Naomi gasped out between laboured breaths whether he'd like to join their team of survivors, seeing as he had nowhere else to go now. Mello had agreed eagerly.
The group was small, but friendly, and by the time Mello's ankle had healed completely, he already felt fully integrated into their community. There had been other groups that traded weapons, food and the like with them at the start, but one by one, these had been wiped out.
Their group had started dwindling too, meaning Mello had been forced to learn how to fight and run much earlier than anyone had planned. By the time he'd spent two months with the group, he was sent out on his first scouting mission, trying to find food and ammo.
In a horrible instance of bad luck, Mello and his partner, Linda, had been taken by surprise by a lone zombie. Inexperienced and panicky, the two were at a loss for what to do, and Linda had been bitten.
Mello'd had to smash her corpse's head in three months later.
Eventually, as group member after group member was changed or killed, it had just become him, Naomi and Raye, until Raye had fallen too.
Naomi had been distraught, and for two weeks, Mello had tried to deal with an empty shell rather than a human, as if she'd died along with her fiancé. Thankfully, she'd snapped out of it once she realised that he was slowly starving trying to keep her alive on their limited food stock, and had been the rock he'd always seen her as ever since.
It had been just them for a long, long while – or maybe it hadn't been so long. Mello couldn't remember. But now she was gone as well, and Mello knew that it was only a matter of time before he followed her.
He got up to tip the water barrel into the contaminated river. It was good for washing, that stream, but not much else.
Trudging back into the building and deciding he may as well go to sleep, Mello's last thought before he surrendered himself to unconsciousness was that he didn't know which he'd rather end up as: zombie chow, or a desiccated corpse.
A/N: I realise there's no Matt in this chapter. I apologise. Next time, I vow to thee! (If you stick with this that long.)